The Nook Tablet

The Tablet That Will Give The iPad A Run For Its Money

After initially leaking a week ago, Barnes & Noble officially announced its $249 Nook Tablet today. On the outside, the Tablet looks a lot like the Nook Color, but its guts have been significantly upgraded to a 1.2 GHz processor, 16 GB of storage and 1 GB of RAM, making it a serious iPad competitor — at half the price. That’s starting to sound familiar.

The Nook Tablet features include the Netflix and Hulu Plus apps, making this a pretty sweet little media tablet. Barnes & Noble also took the opportunity to drop the prices of its existing e-readers.

The Nook Simple Touch drops to $99 and the Color goes from $249 to $199. B&N pointed out it doesn't plan on selling customers short by putting ads on the Touch, like Amazon does with the $139 Kindle 3G (it’s $189 without the ads). People close to Jeff Bezos said he did a “Oh no, she didn't,” and after finishing wagging his finger and head, noted the lack of 3G on the Nook Simple Touch. Sister’s got a point.Considering the size of Amazon’s book sales and the fact that it's selling the Fire at a loss, B&N’s top brass probably welcomed the idea of a $199 Nook Tablet like they do setting money on fire (smoking money cigars has gone out of fashion with their board).

Still, it may be tough for them to draw people away from the Fire with a $50 premium and potentially fewer apps than Amazon’s Android platform. Apple’s response? Presumably it’s “Good luck with that and please fragment Android further.”